Sporting events such as hockey, basketball, baseball, football and soccer pose serious risks of injury for participant athletes. These injuries can be the result of contact between the athletes themselves, contact between the athlete and the ball or puck, and contact between the athlete and the environment. Contact between an athlete and the environment can be the result of contact with the playing surface, such as ice or the ground, or contact with other objects in, or near the playing surface. Examples of sporting environmental injury risks includes contact with dasher boards or the glass in hockey, contact with basketball poles and scoring tables in basketball, contact with field goal posts in football, and any other situation in which an object in, or near the playing field is susceptible to contact as a result of players in, or leaving the field of play. Contact with these environmental objects presents a serious risk of injury. This is often due to the relatively fixed and stationary aspect of these objects which can result in the athlete absorbing most of the force of the collision.
Hockey in particular poses unique injury risks to participants. In particular, players employ a common technique called “body checking,” whereby a player uses his or her body to force the body of the opposing player into the hockey dasher boards or the hockey glass. This technique poses a serious risk of broken bones, torn or strained ligaments, contusions, and concussions as the player contacts the environmental object—i.e. the dasherboards, or glass. Concussions in particular represent a serious threat to hockey players, which can often cause long-term and lasting side effects even years after the initial injury. Contact with environmental injury risks can often contribute to, or cause concussions as the relatively immobile nature of these risks allows for little, if any, shock absorption, and thus the energy of the impact is entirely felt by the athlete.
Proper design of playing surfaces can mitigate the risks posed by environmental injury risks. As an example, the ledger where hockey glass meets hockey dasher boards is an environmental injury risk that has been mitigated some in recent years by the introduction of more yielding materials. Despite these design changes, environmental hazards still exist in hockey. One existing hazard is a glass termination, formed where the glass turns away from the rink to enclose the back, but not the front of the player boxes. Each piece of glass at the corner is connected at this outside corner by a termination post.
The padding covering glass termination hazards oftentimes is inadequate to effectively absorb the impact of the athletes as a result of a collision and can leave the athlete absorbing significant amounts of energy and leading to injury. If padding is provided at all on these terminations, it is usually composed of one layer of thin, and easily compressed soft foam that is wrapped in vinyl. The foam easily compresses upon impact and does little to protect an athlete from injury. Moreover, the foam is simply a flat and square sheet of thin foam, that when installed, is traditionally bent around the corner of the glass termination post, further compressing the already thin foam. This foam is typically an infirm, open cell polyurethane with indent force deflection at 25% of 27-33 lbs measured by ASTM D-3574-01 testing. Indent force deflection is defined as the amount of force, in pounds, required to indent a fifty square inch, round indentor foot into a predefined foam specimen a certain percentage of the specimen's total thickness. A foam rated for shock absorbency generally has an indent force deflection at 25% of 45 lbs and higher. Thus foam that is rated at 27-33 lbs is generally inadequate for safely protecting athletes.
Thus, there exists a need in the art for improved sports safety padding. In particular, improved energy absorbing termination padding for hockey rinks.